Author Description

In a schoolyard in Rostov-on-Don in 1934, the man whose literary works would one day shake the world met Natalya Reshetovskaya, a beautiful young Cossack girl who became his sweetheart. Six years later she became his wife. Their marriage survived a devastating war, arrests and interrogation, and the terrible loneliness and anxiety of years of imprisonment. When he returned from the Gulag, they resumed life together, and she remained by his side as he wrote and. "You," he told her, "have helped me to create."Here, long awaited in the West, is her own memoir of the life they shared spanning a period of more than three decades. She writes of their early years as students, of the first germs of literary ideas that came to him, and of his growing sense of himself as a writer. She describes the long years of the war, as she and her mother, refugees, walked hundreds of miles through the Russian heartland in retreat before the German advance, while Sanya (the nickname she gave ) fought at the front.During those years they desperately tried to stay in touch by mail, and at last, when she obtained a special permit to visit him, there was the joy of a brief reunion.They did not know then what would follow. Solzhenitsyn himself has written of it with unparalleled eloquence. Soviet Russia, at war's end, was in momentous political turmoil. Hundreds of thousands would suffer, he among them. Reshetovskaya describes how she learned of his arrest and how her husband managed to maintain contact in the years of separation that followed. During that time, certain he would never be released, he urged her to be free of him.But in 1956 he was released. Their life together was resumed at last. It was to be an immensely creative period for Solzhenitsyn, and a time of great happiness for both of them. Sadly, it was not to endure.The intimate story of a marriage against impossible odds, and a rare first-hand account of a tumultuous period in Soviet history, Reshetovskaya's memoir is most of all a searching study of Solzhenitsyn himself, by the one person in the world closest to him. Rich with compassion and the insight of their thirty years together, it looks deeply into the mind and heart of a troubled genius, showing how he developed his talent and why he was tormented by his triumphs as well as by his failures.